Level 10.0: Kinds of Stories

Kinds of Stories

We can roughly classify different stories by their overall structure. The structure is determined by what kinds of choices are available to the player, how open or constrained those choices are, and what effect those choices have on both the ongoing story and the final ending. Each structure has its advantages and disadvantages, which we will discuss below.

Linear

Linear stories are the traditional narrative, with some gameplay elements thrown in that do not affect the story. In this case, the story and gameplay must be separate entities, because the story has no choices and the gameplay must include decision-making of some kind (else it is just a story and not a game). They can be thematically linked, and the story may influence gameplay (perhaps when a certain pre-scripted story element happens, it causes a new gameplay effect to come into play), but the gameplay cannot influence the story because there is only one story.

Linear stories have one major advantage over all other story structures: it is easy to apply traditional storytelling techniques, which have been developed over thousands of years. Such a story can have a powerful emotional impact – witness that we still talk of Floyd’s death in Planetfall and Aerith’s death in Final Fantasy 7 as key moments in the history of game narrative… even though neither events was under player control.

Linear stories have the obvious disadvantage that, due to a lack of decisions, they are not very game-like. As stated above, there is a natural barrier between linear stories and game mechanics, which limits the effect the story can have.

Branching

The first and most obvious thing to do to a linear story, if we want to add decisions, is to add choice points at various places. When the player reaches a certain point, they decide what to do, and then the story goes down one of several continuing paths until another choice point is reached. An example is the old-school Phantasy Star III for Sega Genesis; twice in the game, the main character is given a choice of which of two girls to marry (and then the story continues to the next generation of characters), leading to a total of four branches, each with its own story and its own ending. 

• Example: Links to an external site.Choose Your Own Adventure: The Third Planet from Altair gamebook. 

Branching stories have the advantage of being interactive. If you include a sufficiently large number of choices and your choices cover all of the things that a player would want to do, the game can respond believably to any number of player decisions. At first, this would appear to be the ultimate solution to game narrative since it can handle just about anything.

However, there is one major drawback of using a branching story: it is expensive! With only two choices (which is not very many), the story writers of Phantasy Star III still needed to write four stories. A third choice would have had them writing eight stories, and including a mere ten choices would require writing 1024 stories! Consider the number of decisions you make as a player in a typical strategy game, and you’ll see that the amount of work to write a branching story can quickly explode into something unmanageable.

To make things worse, note that a player that goes through the game once will never even see the vast majority of content. It requires multiple replays just to see every path through the story… and even then, the player must decide which is the “real” story and which are the alternate timelines that didn’t actually happen. (If the developers ever make a sequel to the game, they must deal with this problem as well.)

Parallel Paths

This is Bateman’s word for a branching story that collapses in on itself, allowing the player to make choices but then collapsing all of them eventually into several mandatory events. In Silent Hill, for example, there are several choices the player can make that may advance the story or reveal some additional story elements along the way, and these will influence the ending. However, there are certain events that the player is forced to encounter no matter what else they have or haven’t done.

• Example: Links to an external site. Lone Wolf: Fire on Water gamebook. 

Parallel paths solve the problem of branching narrative by keeping the advantage of player decisions while still keeping the total amount of story manageable. So, at first, this would appear to be the ultimate story structure.

As you might guess, there is still a problem: since the player is forced into certain events, the entire plot arc is now essentially linear again. We have lost the player’s feeling that they are directing the story, because no matter what they do there will be certain parts of the story that are the same no matter what.

One potential solution is to have the player decisions alter the game’s ending. The player may still encounter the same plot arc, but the final outcome is determined by the choices the player made. Unfortunately, that means the relationship between cause and effect can be easily lost – the player’s decisions are (by definition) not seen until the very end, and it is often unclear what the player did to cause a certain ending.

And, we still have the problem that the player must replay through the entire game multiple times just to see all the endings.

Threaded

This is Bateman’s term to describe stories that are divided into small pieces, perhaps with several plot arcs going on at once that may or may not intersect. The player then chooses which paths to follow and in what order. One example of this is World of Warcraft, where the player can accept any of several quests to advance different elements of the story. Another example are the Elder Scrolls series of games (like Morrowind and Oblivion), where the player may follow certain storylines based on how they want to advance their character, and the player may find other quests or subplots that they choose to pursue (or not) along the way, and these subplots may or may not have their own effects on the main plot line.

The advantage of a threaded narrative is that it is extremely expressive. You can have multiple storylines happening concurrently, as with nonlinear films like Pulp Fiction or Love, Actually (except, unlike those movies, have the plot lines advance according to player intent).

Also, the story may have multiple beginnings and middles and endings, but the player has access to all of them and can advance any combination of them in any order, so we have finally solved the problem of forced replays. The player can see everything there is to see with a single play-through, if they are thorough enough.

As you might guess, there is still a problem here. First, since some events may affect others, testing out all possible paths through the story can get even more complicated than with a branching narrative. (For programming geeks, a branching story with two choices per choice point is O(N^2), while a threaded narrative is potentially O(N!). Yes, factorial.)

Writing a threaded narrative is hard, because events can happen in any order, leading to the potential for the player to do things in an order that doesn’t make sense (for example, perhaps they are given a quest to assassinate a rival leader in the middle of a war, before the war actually breaks out, or after the war is concluded). The story writer must be careful to allow access to certain story events only when it would make sense to do so. Keeping track of all the variables that determine when a story event is or isn’t active can get very complicated very quickly.

Lastly, a threaded narrative runs the risk of confusing the player, if there are too many concurrent plots happening at a single time and the player does not immediately see the relationships between them. This is also a danger with books and movies that try to tell several stories at once.

Dynamic Object-Oriented Narrative

This last structure is Bateman’s term that, as far as I can tell, he invented to describe the game Façade Links to an external site. (which you should absolutely download and play if you have not yet seen it). The idea is that there are several mini-stories, each with potentially several entry points and exit points. A single mini-story’s exit point may lead to a final ending,or to another mini-story. The mini-stories may be thought of as “chapters” in a book or “acts” in a play (except that you may not “read” all of the chapters or may read them in a different order, depending on the choices you make and how you exit each chapter).

This kind of story has the advantages of parallel paths, but without a linear story arc. Each mini-story has its own choices, and the overall collection of mini-stories itself acts like a larger branching or parallel path story. Each individual mini-story is self-contained, which reduces the required time to write the complete story.

This kind of story has two disadvantages. The first is that there’s still the forced-replay problem: a player must play many times to see all of the story paths (which is perhaps why Façade needs to last about ten or twenty minutes, and not ten or twenty hours). It is also a highly experimental structure, so we do not yet have enough games to really analyze what does and doesn’t work in this form. Façade itself took a couple of guys with PhDs in Computer Science to develop, so this is not the kind of story structure that is easily accessible to a traditional story writer.